Quantifying Usability: How Usability Principles can reshape Approaches to Design

By Alex Faaborg


Software development is built around quantitative measurements. Measurements such as the time it takes an application to load, the amount of memory used, or the load on the CPU. These measurements are all easy to calculate and are wonderfully quantitative. One of the reasons some organizations tend to discount usability (both in practice and in artifacts like the severity descriptions in bug tracking systems), is an inaccurate view that usability is an amorphous and subjective thing that simply can't be scientifically quantified and measured. That assumption is incorrect.

The usability inspection technique of heuristic evaluation, which was introduced by Jakob Nielsen [2,3,4] has emerged as one of the most common ways for professional UX designers to evaluate the usability of a software application. Heuristic evaluations are extremely useful because they formally quantify the usability of a software application against a set of well defined and irrefutable principles. Usability violations can be quantified individually: either an interface supports undo, or it does not, either an interface is internally consistent, or it is not, etc. Usability violations can also be quantified in aggregate: the software application currently has 731 known usability issues.

Additionally, by establishing a tracking system on a set of agreed upon principles, much of the debate on the level of "there is no right or wrong with UI / every user is entitled to their personal opinion / all that matters is the ability to customize" that is currently found in some development communities can be significantly reduced. Usability heuristics will help ground these debates, just as currently in software development no one argues in favor of data loss, or in defense of crashing.

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